Frances Hardinge: 'To be following in the footsteps of Philip Pullman is pretty amazing'

The winner of the Costa book of the year can’t quite believe that – even after a decade as an author – she hasn’t yet been ‘found out’. She talks about faith, being bullied at school, and finding her vocation in a dolphinarium

Frances Hardinge in London, after winning the Costa book of the year prize.
Photograph: Frantzesco Kangaris for the Guardian

It is the morning after the night when Frances Hardinge, author of seven books for older children, astonished one of the book trade’s grandest get-togethers by winning the Costa book of the year prize, in defiance of odds that placed her joint-bottom at 5/1. She is the first children’s author to win since Philip Pullman in 2001 with The Amber Spyglass.

Over breakfast in the library at her publisher’s London office she blinks back her surprise. On her head a black fedora – a style she says she adopted for its sense of adventure.

“I’m still stunned, but now with added sleep deprivation,” she tells me (her first tweet following her win, posted around six this morning, declared her “staggered, honoured, stunned and dumbfounded”). She went to last night’s ceremony expecting to collect her award for the best children’s book, never imagining that when the judges came to compare the five category champions in this most unusual contest – poet, biographer, children’s author, novelist and first-time novelist – they would choose the author of teenage novel The Lie Tree over a field of competitors that included critics’ favourite Kate Atkinson for A God in Ruins.

The rest of the evening, Hardinge says, had “a feeling of unreality as if I’d seen a cat walk past on its hind legs”. She forgot some of her speech. “I probably should have thanked more people – but I didn’t want to get all Oscar on them,” she says. One of the photographs shows her with her hand over her mouth, in the classic gesture of stifled surprise. Who, me?

Long shot she may have been, but from the first words in her latest novel – “The boat moved with a nauseous, relentless rhythm, like someone chewing on a rotten tooth” – it’s clear Hardinge can write. The Lie Tree combines ingredients of mystery, crime, ghost and growing-up stories, and stirs them all together on a gothic island setting in the high-Victorian 1860s.

Faith is the teenage daughter of an unsatisfactory marriage between a clergyman-naturalist father she adores and a vain, silly mother she despises, and the big sister of a little boy in the process of being forced to give up his left-handedness. When her father falls off a cliff, Faith turns investigator, fixated on discovering the truth about his death from a magical tree that feeds on lies but dispenses knowledge. The whole thing is fun and ingenious, with plenty of cliffhangers, a healthy dash of feminism supplied through Faith’s pained awareness of the sexist attitudes that surround her.

In The Lie Tree, Faith is stuck in a training corset because her mother has yet to promote her to the real thing. Hardinge says the image of the corset appealed to her “because that’s a very physical way of moving from identity to another, from one that allows you a bit more physical motion to one that will garner you more respect but is literally constricting”. In one of the novel’s strongest images, she likens Faith’s awkwardness to that of a mermaid, caught between “the safe, hallowed shore of childhood” and “the rock of marriage”.

“I think at the age of about 12 you tend to be considerably underestimated. Between 10 and 12 your understanding of the world is shaping and maturing a lot, you’re questioning a lot more, you’re seeing the flaws and peccadilloes of your parents, they’re no longer infallible, and by extension you’re questioning the outer world, the authorities and all the rest. I think this is a very important rite of passage and of course it’s when you’re physically changing as well.”

Technically I'm still shy but I'm much, much better at pretending that I'm not

As a child, Hardinge says she was “unbelievably shy” and “a bit weird”. “Technically I’m still shy but I’m much, much better at pretending that I’m not,” she explains.

Her self-consciousness, which wasn’t helped by the two years of bullying she suffered at a grammar school in Kent, hasn’t gone away but “no longer paralyses me, I can actually go and talk in front of several hundred people, apparently I can appear on TV and radio, and talk to journalists.”

Looking in the mirror at her TV makeup from the breakfast-show cameras she has already faced today, she says she doesn’t recognise herself, but at 42 she has learned to be brave. She takes mental notes immediately after public appearances or interviews like this one, with the aim of creating an accurate record to set against her tendency to “post-mortem terribly” – or tear herself to pieces with self-criticism. “I’m a great believer in experiencing new things, particularly if they scare me,” she says.

She wrote stories “pretty much from the point when I could hold a pencil” and once planned to beat the record of Daisy Ashford, who wrote the novella The Young Visiters (sic) aged nine. But in the end Hardinge was past 30 when her debut Fly By Night was submitted to a publisher, thanks to a well-judged push from a friend.

When The Lie Tree was published, I thought: 'This time they'll see through me' … Things have not panned out as expected

Even with a decade as an author behind her, during which she has won and judged awards as well as publishing regularly, Hardinge is plagued by doubts: “Like a lot of authors I have galloping imposter syndrome: as far as I’m concerned I have cunningly infiltrated the writing community. With each book that gets published I have this dread fear that I’m going to be found out. Certainly when The Lie Tree was published, I thought: ‘This time they’ll see through me for the fraud I am.’ Things have not panned out as I expected!”

At the centre of The Lie Tree is the serious story of the Victorian struggle between science and religion.

Is Hardinge a Christian? When she was growing up her parents kept their beliefs (or lack of them) entirely secret, which she thinks was “very cool”. It turns out she is similarly private: “Now that’s a question I never answer. I have written some books which look at religious faith, they’re explorations, and if people knew my personal opinions they would then see those books through that filter ... Is that OK?” she asks politely, but making it clear she is drawing a line.

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She has said most of her books are written for herself as a 12 year old, while The Lie Tree jumps a couple of years ahead to 14. When I ask her why this age, she mentions the ritual of confirmation – when children publicly claim their faith – but whether she was confirmed herself she won’t say.

“I don’t want my childhood being used as a reductive way of looking at my books,” she says. Her parents met in the bookshop they both worked in at the time, were both keen readers and her blond-haired, blue-eyed sister, younger by 11 months, was much better at “bouncing around and making friends”. Her maternal grandfather, Harold Mills West, left school at 14 but managed to educate himself to the point where he could enter teaching training college, and published a series of books about East Anglia. Beyond that there aren’t many facts about her family she wants to share.

She calls herself a “little ordinary girl” growing up in a series of small villages, but her childhood, like all childhoods, had its extraordinary moments. One of these took place at the dolphinarium in Brighton, in the dark, when she was about three: “What I remember is the world I knew vanished and I was in this dark, other place with the sound of water and lights I couldn’t identify moving in the distance. I remember a sense of awe and a sort of fear but also excitement and a weird stillness. Everything was potent and vivid and then the lights came back on but those seconds where I felt transported to that terrifying but fascinating other place left this imprint, as if part of my imagination never came back. I’m sorry, that sounds completely weird,” she appends with a grin.

I was an everything-minded girl. I wanted to be many things, but definitely a writer, an artist and an international spy

Recently she sorted through some old school exercise books, and was struck by the sinister quality in some of her first poems: “For a tiny, sweet, mousy little thing there’s already this slightly dark stuff going on.” She read everything from Susan Cooper to Kipling and Thomas Hardy, whose books she was given by her village primary school headteacher who saw she was bored. “I was an everything-minded girl,” she says, “I wanted to be so many things, but definitely a writer and an artist and an international spy.”

She studied maths as well as English A-level and was drawn to history, fantasy and science as well as the English literature she studied at Oxford, where she won a place at the second attempt, having made up her mind this was where she wanted to be. “I thought: ‘I’m coming here, even if they don’t know I am, I like this place, I can think better here,’” she says stoutly. “I’m more than slightly stubborn about things that are important to me.” After graduating she stayed on.

Hardinge has the city in common with Philip Pullman: “Needless to say I do not consider myself to be in the same league as him, I’ve got a bit of a way to go before anything like that, but to be following in his footsteps” – she drops her voice to a whisper – “is pretty amazing”. She now lives in Isleworth, west London, with her long-term boyfriend, who works in computing.

So does Hardinge believe The Lie Tree – now elevated to the company of previous Costa and Whitbread winners including Hilary Mantel and Ted Hughes – is her best book?

“My children have little hardback and paperback covers and they are all extremely different,” she says. “I would find it very hard to pick a favourite, and the others would be jealous.”

Costa doesn’t award a statuette like an Oscar or the Bessie awarded to the winner of the women-only Orange prize. So far, along with the boost in publicity and sales, Hardinge’s winnings amount to an IOU for £30,000, some of which she may spend on “toys”. (“I’m a geek, I have a working lightsaber, maybe I should get Martin one as well so we can have duels?”)

What does she think about current anxieties surrounding children’s use of technology? “I don’t think there should be a blanket anxiety about technology and it’s sufficiently complex that I don’t think I can give a yes or no answer.”

But sometimes there is nothing like a piece of paper. “There’s an envelope that says ‘Costa book of the year winner’ and I keep looking at that. I’m definitely keeping that envelope.”